XSLT Tag (was Re: Difference between Turbine and Struts)

[David Geary <sa...@tri-lakesonline.net>]

"Craig R. McClanahan" wrote:

> One of the approaches I'm looking at for this is to let you define XSLT
> mappings in your JSP page itself -- something like this:
>
>     <xsl:xslt stylesheet="xxxxx.xsl">
>         ... XML elements to be transformed ...
>     </xsl:xslt>
>
> There is a custom tag somewhat like this in the "jakarta-taglibs" project
> already, but at the moment it deals only with external XML and XSL files -- we
> need an extension for the nesting option above.  There is also work going on in
> the Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specs that might let you specify things like XSLT
> transformations externally, to be applied for you by the servlet container.
> But that's for the future -- this approach should be feasible now.

I think the tag is a good idea, but as you point out it's likely to be superseded,
perhaps by the JSP standard tag library.

> I am not an XML guru, but it seems to me that any such approach would mean not
> using the "form" series of custom tags, because they render legal HTML syntax,
> but not necessarily legal XML syntax.  Am I missing something here?

The most common use of XSLT in a JSP page is transforming XML into HTML, so in that
case, the form tags can peacefully coexist. If the XSLT transforms XML into
something other than HTML, then the form tags don't make sense anyway.



david